T Max M. Ward H O U GCRIME H Ideology & State Power in Interwar Japan T THOUGHT CRIME T H O U G H asia pacific Asia- Pacific Culture, Politics, and Society Editors: Rey Chow, Michael Dutton, H. D. Harootunian, and Rosalind C. Morris A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University T T Max M. Ward H O U G H CRIME T Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan Duke University Press Durham and London 2019 © 2019 duke university press. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca on acid- free paper ∞ Designed by Courtney Baker Typeset in Arno pro by Westchester Publishing Services Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Ward, Max M., [date] author. Title: Thought crime : ideology and state power in interwar Japan / Max M. Ward. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2019. | Series: Asia Pacific | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018031281 (print) | lccn 2018038062 (ebook) isbn 9781478002741 (ebook) isbn 9781478001317 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9781478001652 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Lese majesty— Law and legislation— Japan— History—20th century. | Po liti cal crimes and offenses— Japan— History—20th century. | Japan— Politics and government— 1926–1945. | Japan— Politics and government—1912–1945. | Japan— History—1912–1945. Classification: lcc knx4438 (ebook) | lcc knx4438 .w37 2019 (print) lc rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2018031281 Cover art: Newspaper clippings from the Yomiuri Shimbun, 1925-1938. Courtesy of the Yomiuri Shimbun. Dedicated to the punks, in the streets and the ivory towers contents Preface: Policing Ideological Threats, Then and Now ​ix Acknowl edgments ​xv introduction. The Ghost in the Machine:Emperor System Ideology and the Peace Preservation Law Apparatus 1 1. Kokutai and the Aporias of Imperial Sovereignty: The Passage of the Peace Preservation Law in 1925 21 2. Transcriptions of Power: Repression and Rehabilitation in the Early Peace Preservation Law Apparatus, 1925–1933 49 3. Apparatuses of Subjection: The Rehabilitation of Thought Criminals in the Early 1930s 77 4. Nurturing the Ideological Avowal: Toward the Codification of Tenkō in 1936 113 5. The Ideology of Conversion: Tenkō on the Eve of Total War 145 epilogue. The Legacies of the Thought Rehabilitation System in Postwar Japan ​179 Notes 18 5 Bibliography 261 Index 281 Preface. Policing Ideological Threats, Then and Now In Thought Crime, I analyze the transformations of an interwar Japa nese an- tiradical law called the Peace Preservation Law (Chianijihō), from its initial passage to suppress communism and anticolonial nationalism in 1925, to its expansion in the 1930s into an elaborate system to “ideologically convert” (tenkō) and rehabilitate thousands of po liti cal criminals throughout the Japa- nese Empire, to how the law’s rehabilitation policies provided a model for mobilizing the populations of the Japa nese Empire for total war in the 1940s. I am particularly interested in how the law provides a well- documented ex- ample of how a modern state deployed a combination of repression and re- habilitation when policing po liti cal threats (real or imagined), as well as how such efforts reveal the under lying ideology par tic u lar to the prewar Japa nese imperial state. My interest in the Peace Preservation Law is therefore two- fold. First, I want to intervene in the defining historical debates over the na- ture of the prewar imperial state and the consolidation of fascism in Japan during the interwar period. Second, I utilize the par tic u lar history of the Peace Preservation Law in order to consider the vari ous modes of power that states, not just the interwar Japa nese state, use to police po liti cal threats, thus reproducing and redefining their respective national polities in the pro cess. This latter aspect of my proj ect became particularly clear to me as I was finishing this book while on sabbatical in Tokyo in 2015–2016. I would often take breaks from reading arcane interwar Japa nese Justice Ministry reports by catching up on the latest international news. One par tic u lar news story caught my attention: the arrest of young Somali American men in Minneap- olis, Minnesota, for allegedly trying to join isil in Syria.1 Within the context of the United States’ perpetual state of exception called the war on terror, I was not necessarily surprised by these arrests.2 However, what was especially intriguing was how the Minneapolis case was being framed by a discourse of the radicalization of ideologies from abroad, and how the district court in Minneapolis was considering ways to assess the defendants’ degree of radicalization.3 These aspects resonated with what I was reading in Japa nese documents from the 1920s and 1930s, when justice officials described domes- tic radical politics as the result of dangerous “foreign ideas” (gairai shisō) “in- filtrating” sennyū( ) the Japa nese Empire and infecting it from within. These foreign ideas, it was said, turned imperial Japa nese subjects into internal agents of a foreign enemy ( here, the Soviet Union). Explained in this way, communism, anticolonial nationalism, and other ideologies were defined as “thought crime” (shisō hanzai), and by the 1930s, the Japa nese state had es- tablished an extensive security apparatus to identify, assess, and ultimately rehabilitate thousands of so- called thought criminals (shisō hannin). Today, this logic of external ideas producing internal enemies can be found in the discourse of homegrown terrorism, wherein foreign jihadist ideology ostensibly radicalizes citizens or recent immigrants in Eur ope and the United States so that they carry out the objectives of foreign enemies. Of course, the sociohistorical contexts and politico- ideological content of these two cases are extremely diff er ent. However, I was struck by the dis- cursive similarities in how the two states defined their respective threats as, essentially, external ideas that were/are infecting their respective national polities, and how such a notion allowed the two states to generate fear and mobilize their populations. In par tic ul ar, I became interested in the way such a definition authorized both states to diffuse their policing powers into com- munities, bringing together police, courts, prison officials, families, reli- gious institutions, educators, and employers to assist with reforming thos e believed to have been led astray by dangerous foreign ideas. Indeed, at the time of this writing, many Japa nese legal scholars are expressing strong criti- cism of the legal reinterpretations being carried out by the cabinet of prime minister Abe Shinzō in the name of the war on terror and national defense, pointing to similarities with prewar le gal developments, and the Peace Pres- ervation Law in partic u lar. 4 In both cases, state officials envisioned systems that, with collaboration from the local community, would monitor, assess, and rehabilitate those be- lieved to be harboring dangerous ideas. In Japan, this system was actualized in a network of so- called Thought Criminal Protection and Supervision Cen- ters (Shisōhan hogo kansatsu sho) in 1936. Although much more cursory and experimental than the prewar Japa nese example, the Minneapolis District Court created a Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program in March 2016.5 The first step in this new program was to assess the degree of a defendant’s radicalization upon arrest so as to determine a sentence appropri- ate to the level of danger the defendant ostensibly posed. For example, a x Preface Minneapolis district judge, Michael Davis, hired Daniel Koehler of the Ger- man Institute on Radicalization and Deradicalization Studies (girds) to evaluate the degree of radicalization of four out of the nine defendants before they were sentenced.6 The MinneapolisStar Tribune summarized Koehler’s charge as to “identify the fa ctors that drove the radicalization of the defen- dants, identify their risk of reoffending and specify strategies to steer them away from radical ideologies.”7 As we will see in Thought Crime, Koehler’s charge echoes interwar Japa nese Justice Ministry materials that instructed court procurators (kenji) to assess the danger posed by so- called thought criminals before their formal indictment or sentencing. Similar to Koehler, Japa nese procurators produced official reportsjōshinsho ( ) on each thought criminal, assessing the degree of a defendant’s commitment to communist internationalism or anticolonial nationalism, and their potential to be rehabili- tated through a multistage program of ideological conversion (tenkō). In both cases, ideas became the target of inquiry. For example, Koehler explained that his evaluations would assess “if the se thoughts and ideas [i.e., jihad] actually determined this be hav ior and . ​led them to the point where they did something illegal.”8 The Minneapolis defendants had already been found guilty of conspiring to join isil. Thus Koehler’s task was to interrogate the ideas motivating the defendants’ actions in order to assess their reformabil- ity for sentencing.9 Ultimately, Minnesota chief US probation officer Kevin Lowry summarized the objective of this program in this way, using rhe toric that could have come from the interwar Japa nese example: “If a radicalized defendant or offender is not properly treated, theyw ill continue to infect our communities . ​and they’ll look to harm the community and martyr themselves if [ they’re not treated] with a balance between rehabilitation and public safety.”10 Here the radicalized defendants in Minneapolis embodied the danger of dangerous ideas spreading in their communities, and thus we can imagine that authorities would extend their balance between “rehabilita- tion and public safety” beyond pretrial interventions into postparole reform programs and preemptive monitoring to locate others who might be suscep- tible to becoming, in Lowry’s terminology, “infected” by such ideas. The Japa nese interwar state similarly policed suspects by identifying the ideas that determined a communist’s motives for joining the illegal Japa nese Communist Party (jcp).